It is strange to think that it’s been 20 years since the greatest single rock and roll concert in history, stranger that I actually got to see it live and strangest to realize that I had to go to Cleveland to see it.
Cleveland was where the first rock and roll show took place, in 1952. It was called a “package” show, in that several different musical acts were engaged to perform short sets of their most popular songs for one ticket price. Presented by a local DJ, Alan Freed, the so-called “Moondog Coronation Ball” cost a buck-fifty to get in and unexpectedly drew 10,000 kids anxious to do just that. Cleveland cops were so frightened by the prospect that they closed down the show before even one song was completed.
The first rock and roll show I ever saw took place at the Municipal (now Boutwell) Auditorium downtown in 1965. It, too, was a package show, called “The WVOK Shower of Stars,” and it seems to me that the Young Rascals topped the bill. Five thousand people showed up and Lou Christie’s unearthly singing frightened many of them.
Thirty years after that, some sort of curious circle was closed when I traveled to Cleveland on a whim and a prayer for the biggest package show of them all, “The Concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.”
Throughout years of attending concerts, I have seen small crowds, such as when Mississippi Fred McDowell played his blues for 30 people in a Tuscaloosa coffeehouse, and large crowds, as when 250,000 jammed the second Atlanta Pop Festival. I’ve witnessed short sets, as when Todd Rundgren performed with a tape recorder for a disapproving University of Alabama audience, and long sets, like pretty much any Bruce Springsteen performance. I have endured bitter cold to see rock shows—the Stones in Auburn, ‘69—and stifling heat—the Stones in Memphis, ’75. In all of these well-frittered hours and years of watching grown men and women play guitars and beat drums, I had never come to any certain conclusion why I should have bothered in the first place. The possibility of a summary suggested by the opening of a museum of rock and roll made a pilgrimage to Cleveland in September 1995 inevitable.
It did not present as a magical journey. Cleveland was another dying American industrial center staving off its disappearance from the map by building great symbolic public buildings where its payrolls used to be. The main differences between Cleveland and Birmingham were that their empty skyscrapers were taller than ours and they had freighters sailing through the middle of their town.
According to the local papers, this concert event was Cleveland’s last best chance to impress a crowd that otherwise would never come so close to a Great Lake, so residents tuned out en masse wearing “Ask Me!” t-shirts and greeting visitors with a civic jollity which could have been mistaken for desperation under different circumstances.
I never entertained any misapprehensions about the aesthetics of rock and roll, so I was not surprised by ubiquitous corporate endorsements of The Devil’s Music. One Fortune 500 company after another had plastered the city with booster ads worthy of Oktoberfest. The only one that brought me up short was the banner announcing, “The U.S. Coast Guard Welcomes You to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.” I wondered if Jimi Hendrix’s bellbottoms might have clashed a little with theirs.
The first thing I did upon arriving at Cleveland Municipal Stadium for the big show was to encounter my old high school classmate, Pete Owen. Pete is the insider’s insider’s insider. I could be on safari in Cameroon or playing Yahtzee with the Pope and I would still run into Pete Owen. Pete had heard the soundcheck already and suggested a memorable experience was at hand. He was not wrong, for the second thing I did was to walk out onto the historic field where the Indians and the Browns played their respective professional games. Groundskeepers hate it when civilians walk onto their grasses. It was refreshing to see some Clevelanders not smiling for a change.
Audio and video documentation of the extraordinary show can be found readily online, so let us skip the play-by-play and go straight to some color commentary.
It started off well enough. To satisfy those who believe rock and roll begins and ends with Chuck Berry, the aged satyr opened the proceedings, backed by the E Street Band. We in the stadium saw the musicians saunter onstage some minutes before the first number kicked off, looking oddly dispirited. (It was later revealed that they didn’t care to take their cues from HBO floor directors and that Berry had rebuffed the E Streeters’ request to actually rehearse a little before the worldwide pay-per-view broadcast commenced.)
An expensive revolving stage dutifully disgorged John Mellencamp, Martha Reeves and Bon Jovi while millionaire recording industry executives played at being veejays. Then subversion crept onstage. The heartiest music of the first set came from a gay woman, Melissa Etheridge, who slyly introduced her homage to girl groups asking, “Do you remember when rock wore a dress?”
Dr. John, armed with only a piano, summoned the bordello shades of old New Orleans, and the Reverend Al Green stepped away from his pulpit to recall his salacious salad days as The Last of the Soul Men, backed up by The Last of the Soul Bands, Booker T & The MGs.
Al sang Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” as though he thought one might, then Chrissie Hynde took back “My City Was Gone” from Rush Limbaugh once and for all. Mellencamp missed Johnny Cash’s key altogether on their “Folsom Prison Blues” duet and through binoculars I could see HBO weasels pacing nervously backstage.
The show was going properly awry now. For every bloop single by Sheryl Crow or Jackson Browne or Natalie Merchant, there were solid hits for extra bases by John Fogerty, George Clinton and the Kinks. Which tribute do you think better captured the spirit of the evening better: Bruce Hornsby playing a Grateful Dead medley in honor of the recently deceased Jerry Garcia, or James Brown halting the glorious excess of “A Man’s Man’s World” to ask for, and almost get, “a moment of silence for Garcia and Mickey Mantle”?
To satisfy those who believe that rock and roll begins and ends with Chuck Berry, the aged satyr closed the proceedings, backed by the E Street Band. However, by that time, which was 2 a.m. Eastern, Chuck was literally reelin’ and rockin.’ When he realized the HBO cameras had long since turned off, he quit playing in the middle of a chorus, handed his Gibson guitar to a bemused Bruce Springsteen and exited stage left; go, go, go, Johnny B. Gone.
An hour later, my traveling companion and I were on Superior Street waiting on a bus when I realized nobody the whole night long had played an Elvis Presley song.
The Rock Hall Museum is a beautiful tomb on the Lakefront for the relics of rock and roll, less a tribute to musicians than to the merchants who packaged them in the first place. All those lovingly collected artifacts so masterfully displayed there are of but fleeting interest, for the songs were all that ever mattered, really, the songs and the personal, private epiphanies you derived from them. Rock and roll was found precious because it evoked passion from a passionless society, it uttered emotional truths on behalf of a population rendered mute by the postwar American experience. Its artifacts are of little consequence, because the fact is, we already carry the museum around in our heads.
Is rock and roll dead at last? Not necessarily; there are great young bands proliferating to carry on the tradition of big noise and confusion. Rock and roll thrives 60 years down the road, one of the few world musics to have developed succeeding generations of devotees. The music that was the soundtrack for youthful alienation becomes the music of those who begin to rage against the dying of the light.
Chuck Berry could probably tell you: perhaps ya just keep rockin’ because you can.